EPS Co-Editor Luis de Sousa will complete his term of office this month. Professor de Sousa joined European Political Science (EPS) in August 2009 and has been instrumental in the continued development and growth EPS has seen in content, readership and profile. As a journal of the profession the aim of EPS is unique, yet it has consistently achieved excellent Impact Factors over the past three years. The ECPR wishes to both acknowledge and thank Professor de Sousa for his excellent work. Professor de Sousa will be succeeded by Ekaterina Rashkova.

Claudio Radaelli completes term as EJPR editor 29/07/2015

After six years of office on the ECPR’s flagship journal, the European Journal of Political Research (EJPR), Claudio Radaelli will stand down this month. Professor Radaelli joined the EJPR in August 2009, seeing the journal through its 40th anniversary, advising on the development of the Political Data Yearbook into its online form, and growing the excellent reputation of the journal, which culminated in an impressive Impact Factor in 2014 and corresponding placing of no 8 in the rankings. The ECPR wishes to both acknowledge and thank Professor Radaelli for his excellent work. Professor Radaelli will be succeeded by Cas Mudde.

Stein Rokkan Prize awarded to Marius R. Busemeyer 29/07/2015

The 2015 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research has been awarded to Marius R. Busemeyer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Konstanz, for his book Skills and Inequality: Partisan Politics and the Political Economy of Education Reforms in Western Welfare States (2014, Cambridge University Press). In this book Busemeyer’s central ambition is to show that education and training systems are central to understanding the evolution of Western European welfare systems. The Jury felt that the book constitutes a 'very substantial and original contribution in comparative social science research', as stipulated as the main criterion for the award of the Stein Rokkan Prize.' More detail of the judges report can be found here.

Marius Busemeyer studied political science, economics and public law at the University of Heidelberg, where he received his PhD in 2006. He served as a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, between 2006 and 2010. His research focuses on comparative political economy, welfare states, public spending, social democratic parties and theories of institutional change.

Sean Mueller explains centralisation and decentralisation across the 26 Swiss cantons using sociocultural, political-ideological, and macro-structural approaches. When decentralisation is first predicted using linear regression models, three significant variables emerge: political culture, area, and the strength of leftwing parties. Then, using process tracing, Mueller studies four cantons over time, to move from identifying correlation to establishing causation. Finally, the author draws causal inferences for (de)centralisation, urging future federal and territorial politics studies to reconceptualise decentralisation into three distinct but related dimensions and to bridge the theoretical gap between socio-cultural, structural and party-political approaches.

'A groundbreaking demonstration of how readily available, reliable data can be used to enrich understandings of the subnational dynamics of governance.'AJ Brown, Griffith University